The aim of Margaret Garb's social history is to discover how the owner-occupied, single-family house “came to embody the American ideal of the family home” (p. 2). Her contention is that “struggles over property rights in housing fundamentally transformed living conditions and social relations in American cities” (p. 2). Garb does a superb job of reporting how working-class families and social service reformers confronted issues involving property rights and housing.

City of American Dreams begins with the protest over the proposed post–Chicago Fire ordinance prohibiting frame construction; it ends with the race riots of 1919. The former threatened the ability of immigrant wage laborers to afford a home; the latter, “in important ways was a tragic result of the reorganization of residential property relations that began in the final decades of the nineteenth century” (p. 1). That reorganization involved the health concerns aroused by homes that remained unconnected to Chicago's sanitation system.

Garb's research poses an important question for economic historians: what should be done about families who cannot afford new technologies, such as indoor plumbing, with significant net social benefits? It marshals impressive evidence illustrating the problem, but fails to provide an answer. There well may be no answer.

In 1871 European immigrant workers were anxious about their ability to afford homes built of brick and hopeful of limiting Chicago's “fire limits.” In the first chapter, Garb discusses how owner-occupiers used their property to produce income and household necessities. She contrasts this to the apartment's emergence as preferred housing for white-collar workers. A small frame house cost $800–1,000, two to three times the annual income of an unskilled worker. Rent for a middle-class apartment ran between $15 and $25 per month. Under reasonable assumptions, the monthly payment on an $800 mortgage would be in the neighborhood of $15–20. As Garb intimates, the distinction between frame homeowners and apartment dwellers was more than economic.

In her second chapter, Garb tells the stories of several working-class families who make “skillful and strategic” uses of property, a process facilitated by deflation and the emergence of more formal lending agencies (e.g., building and loan associations). Garb refers to August 1879 as a time of “soaring inflation” (p. 50) and asserts that “Low wages enabled capitalists to distribute ever-growing profits to investors …” (p. 52). Yet, the stock yield index, like the CPI, was falling. Nonetheless, Chicago real estate prices were rising as in-migration raised demand faster than housing could be supplied.

As time passed, small frame cottages filtered down. Two decades later, they were subdivided into multifamily residences; some were moved to the rear of the property to make room for tenements. Both cottages and tenements generally lacked indoor plumbing; Chicago generally did not supply sanitary services to these areas.

Health concerns enter in the third chapter as tenements come to house a growing proportion of the working class. Chicago's first housing ordinance was passed because the lack of indoor plumbing created a fertile environment for infectious disease. Garb shows the link between health and housing was taken one step further: “An analysis that linked disease to race or national origin of tenants permitted propertied Chicagoans to avoid investing capital in improving tenement dwellings and provided them with (pseudo)scientific justification for regulating the immigrant poor” (p. 63). The balance of the chapter looks at the work of sanitarians, particularly the head of Chicago's Health Department, who understood the analysis above involved one link too many.

Chapter 4 discusses indoor plumbing technology, but one of the most important questions is not addressed in any detail: how much? Indoor plumbing made a house healthier, but also more expensive, both privately and publicly. A Chicago ordinance that required indoor plumbing in all new construction “was hardly enforced along the streets lined with multifamily frame dwellings” (p. 106). For a homeowner, adding mains and sewer pipes to an existing structure involved major construction. For the city, the installation of sanitation works was a major capital cost. It was one of the major expenditures of American cities during Garb's study period. It put most cities up against the 5 percent of assessed valuation constitutional borrowing limit, which Garb fails to mention. Cities had to choose where to construct new lines.

In Chicago, such decisions were complicated by the fact that annexation elections (1889) increased the city by 125 square miles. Garb mentions this annexation only in passing, but it was clear that most of the suburban areas seeking to join Chicago did so to gain access to the city's sanitation system. The water systems of villages such as Hyde Park had to be integrated into Chicago's. The expansion of the sewerage system was so expensive that it required the creation of a supragovernment, the Sanitary District of Chicago, with its own borrowing limit.

Did Chicago fail to supply sanitation services to poor neighborhoods because it felt there was no demand, or was there no demand because Chicago offered no supply? Chicago had little reason to believe they were demanded. Where facilities were supplied, many residents chose not to pay the connection fee; many of those who did pay had no indoor plumbing. Garb suggests that clean water and efficient waste disposal were “privatized” (p. 116), but water mains and sewers are still supplied through city government. There was excess demand. Those forced to go without complained about how the limited supply was rationed. The potential of alternate arrangements to supply more Chicagoans at an acceptable cost remains unexplored.

Chapter 5 discusses contractors such as S. E. Gross who supplied inexpensive homes with indoor plumbing. Garb notes the inclusion of indoor plumbing increased Gross's costs by $500. It is not clear to what that number should be compared. A few years earlier, the asking price for a Gross home without indoor plumbing was $950–1,300. Thus, it appears that indoor plumbing could have increased costs by 50 percent or more. Incomes did not rise that quickly, so how was the cost increase met? Garb notes that “women's remunerative labor was a critical component in the realization of home ownership” (p. 140).

The sixth chapter focuses on the University of Chicago Settlement House, an endeavor in which university researchers and others sought to reform the family home and improve neighborhood life. Indoor plumbing was one such improvement. Garb terms the increasing cost of home ownership an “unintended consequence.” The final chapter examines the housing market for blacks circa 1919. Garb does not explore the paradox between the belief that the presence of African-Americans depressed real estate values and the fact that rents were higher inside the “color line” because of housing scarcity. The fact that many of these neighborhoods still lacked sanitation services means to Garb that Chicago remained “unwilling to invest city funds in working-class neighborhoods” (p. 201).

The book concludes with a brief epilogue that effectively summarizes the social, but not the economic, issues. This is a fascinating book, but economic historians will find it raises as many questions as it answers.